CloneVDI isn't copying the file, it's creating a new file with the same content, rearranged for efficiency. If you think you can create a streaming DMA copy algorithm that can do that, then be my guest!

And incidentally, the speed certainly does change with the hardware. I recently replaced my standard consumer grade hdd with a faster pro model, and the throughput doubled, from 25MB/s to 50MB/s when that drive was both source and dest. But, if either source or dest drive is especially slow (e.g. USB) then of course that will dominate the timing. The software is optimized for the scenario where the source and dest drives are the same: if memory serves it will read ahead around 16MB into a buffer before turning the I/O direction around. Testing done at the time told me that the law of diminishing returns applied heavily beyond that point.

and then just right click the application's EXE, select to run with other appplication, then find and select "Wine". Then browse to your .vdi location (i.e. /root/VirtualBox VMs/myvm/myvm.vdi) and increase size

Nice program, very useful. You should make a paid version, or at least make it ad supported.

Well thank you, but I've known for quite some time that the tool works under Wine on Linux and OS X hosts! It's mentioned in the release notes, and I've had a CloneVDI sticky topic in the "Linux Hosts" forum here since 2009.

mpack wrote:Well thank you, but I've known for quite some time that the tool works under Wine on Linux and OS X hosts! It's mentioned in the release notes, and I've had a CloneVDI sticky topic in the "Linux Hosts" forum here since 2009.

Hello .... I came across your clonevdi tool through browsing the web .... this tool is exactly what I need ... I have tried it and it works very well .... However, I need to schedule it to run on a daily basis .... how can I do that? Noting that the GUI requires input ..... In my case the input is always the same ... so if the source code was available then it could be scheduled to run daily with the required input embedded in the code ... Is there a way to get hold of the code? thank you very much ............

thanks for that awesome tool. Running under wine as no problem at all. It saves just an enormous amount of time. Before I found your tool, I was e.g. trying to reduce the size of a Windows 7 64bit VM down from 58 GB. The allowed size was 159 GB. I first tried nullfile, which took forever and did not help. At one point I noticed that probably due to some mistake I had made, it actually was trying to write a huge file on my host system. I ended up finding a 500 GB or so file. Nice. Next, I tried sdelete -c, and then vboxmanage -compact, which ended up giving me a file that had gone up to its maximum size, i.e., 159 GB. That option, too, take several hours and, of course, did not help at all.

Then enter CloneVDI. apt-get install wine, then go to the folder which holds the disk file, choose it, and go. Just for fun, I ran it on the 159 GB file, later also on the original 59 GB file - which made no difference really. So with your tool, I could collapse 159 GB into 36 GB in under 5 minutes:

For me, not enough difference to warrant running sdelete and VboxManage when CloneVDI does it in one step, much faster. sdelete running in a VM also seems to hog most of the SSD's bandwidth which is annoying on the host and other VMs.